Salut! I'm Amielle, a freelance photojournalist currently living in Madrid, Spain as an au pair. This is where I share what I see and the life that goes along with it. Where I (sometimes) struggle with the balance between 'pictures' and 'a story'. Where I never give up, even if I don't have it quite right.

I have a camera; thus I take pictures and share stories.

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Just a Little Messy

For someone who’s s really into all things neat, tidy and organized, I’m also very fond of messy and chaotic. Specifically when I’m ‘making’ something. When I was in high school and spent hours painting, I’d have paint scattered around me, brushes, magazines, containers of water, all of it just spreading out around my room. When I pack, I have this (potentially bad?) habit of pulling everything out, dumping it on my bed and then trying to figure out how it all fits into my bag. (Here’s a good example (or two) from when I left France last July.) The same goes for when I’m cooking. I grab everything I need and then proceed to make a big, unholy mess as I’m cutting and peeling and grating. And I love it.

There’s two things to this. One is the making of the mess. There’s just something a little bit freeing about things being scattered and tossed, of little mountains of things. For me, as I said, this happens mostly while I’m ‘making’ something (food, art, etc.) and there’s something exciting about seeing how all these separate things are being taken apart or altered and then put into something new. All the leftovers show what you had and the final product shows what they came together to make and that’s really cool. The other thing is the cleaning up of the mess. I like cleaning up. Well, most of the time. As I said, I like neat, tidy and organized. Sitting down at a desk where everything’s in it’s place or opening a desk drawer and finding what I need. That’s relaxing for me. After making a mess, after all that making and pulling apart and putting back together and making, things need to be tidied up. Seeing things be returned to their proper spot, washing out paint brushes or washing pots and pans, getting things back to their proper state, is actually half the fun of those activities for me.

This also means that I really like messy pictures. Or pictures of mess, more accurately. Seeing the process that people go through to make whatever their end product is intrigues me because of course whatever that final product is didn’t just happen like that. There were messes made, that started out small and got bigger along the way before it all got gathered and cleaned up, thrown away, recycled, washed and put back in its place.